The media, the politicians, the police, all the supporters of the old world, can’t understand and won’t understand what it is we’re up to. No leaders? No demands? No point! Perplexed and threatened, they can only lie, distort, and violently suppress us.

“You’ve made your point, now move along” is their refrain, showing that they’ve completely missed the point themselves.

This seven-minute video gives a pretty good brief impression of what happened in Oakland yesterday, following the police destruction of the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Among other things, I call your attention to a poignant interaction around 4:45 where a few marchers start pushing a dumpster, as if to start a barricade. A guy hugs one of them and pleads with them, “Oh, no, guys, come on, let’s be civil.” One of the others says, “Are they [the police] being fuckin’ civil?!” Hugging that second guy, he says, “I know, brother, they’re savages, they’re fuckin’ savages. But don’t be like them! Don’t be like them!” If you think that rhetoric is excessive, note the very end of the video, where lots of people are running away and one of them is hit by a tear gas canister and falls to the ground. Several of the others run back to help him, and as they are all crowding around, the police throw a flash-bang grenade right down into the group which explodes in the injured man’s face. Here is a clearer view of the same incident. The young man, an Iraq war veteran, has a fractured skull and is in critical condition. But I guess this sort of thing has to be done in order to maintain “public peace” and keep the Plaza nice and “hygienic” . . .

To all those across the world currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “the Arab spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a system that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

Pdf of illustrated pamphlet for printing here (select “print on both sides” and “flip up pages”). Illustrated pdf for on-screen reading here.

The “99% Movement” has adopted the term “occupy” from the anti-capitalist tradition, in which people have occupied workplaces, neighborhoods, school buildings, etc., as moves toward taking control over the “means of production” in order to make things and share them, “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” without the mediation of money. However, starting with the original Adbusters call, an influential current within the movement has suppressed this history, treating “occupation” as a temporary and symbolic means of petitioning the government to crack down on “corporate greed” and “corruption.” As anti-capitalists, we oppose such reformism not because we’re attached to some “radical” identity, and certainly not out of nostalgia for the old “socialist” movements (whether of Stalinist or social democratic varieties – both ended up producing only different forms of capitalism). It is simply that the reformist agenda has failed repeatedly. (Anti-capitalist movements, on the other hand, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the present, have only been defeated, or undermined by confusion; prior to defeat, they have shown some promising beginnings.) Reformism has failed because any meaningful pro-worker regulations eventually become fetters to capital’s health, so it becomes necessary to dismantle them – to “save the economy” (i.e. capitalism). That’s what we’re experiencing now, and a return to more regulation, more taxing of the rich to fund social services, etc., is something capital cannot afford without first restoring the rate of profit, which (if possible) would require more of the same: rising unemployment, falling wages, cuts to public goods and services, and the acceleration of energy wars and environmental devastation, bringing us ever closer to catastrophe. So reformism is “utopian”; the only “realistic” way out of this mess is the path we have yet to forge.

We are the generation of the abandoned, the betrayed. Tossed up on the shores of the present by 150 years of failed insurrection, by the shipwreck of the workers’ movement, the failure of a hundred political projects. But it is not only our once-upon-a-time friends who have departed. Today, even our enemies flee from us, even capital abandons us: no more its minimum promises, the right to be exploited, the right to sell one’s labor power. Abandoned, we greet the world with utter abandon. There is no longer any possible adequacy of means and ends, no way of subordinating our actions to the rational or the practical. The present age of austerity means that even the most meager of demands require the social democrats to pick up bricks. Betrayed by democracy, betrayed by the technocrats of socialism, betrayed by the dumb idealism of anarchy, betrayed by the stolid fatalism of the communist ultraleft. We are not the 99%. We are not a fucking percentage at all. We do not count. If we have any power, it is because we are the enemies of all majority, enemies of “the people.” As the old song goes, we are nothing and must become everything.

With several months of preparation and one month of action, Occupy Wall Street has accomplished what years of conventional activism has failed to do–spark a populist political awakening against the ruling class. The 99ers have captured the imagination of regular Americans from every background and point of view, unified by a general disgust with the upper 1% who have run our economic, political and social areas of life into the ground. The defiant occupation of public space in the heart of the capitalist system has not only inspired us, but challenged our sense of complacency in the age of crisis.

Social rebels from around Oakland have descended upon Oscar Grant Plaza and have created a genuine, autonomous space free of police and unwelcoming to politicians. Whereas other occupations have invited the police and politicians, or have negotiated with them, Occupy Oakland has carved a line in the cement. That line of demarcation says: if you pass this, if you try and break up or over shadow this autonomous space, you are well aware, as observed over the last couple of years, what we are capable of.

This article is a report back on the first week at Occupy Oakland, a reflection on problems we have been facing and some thoughts on moving the occupation forward; onto some next level shit.(more…)